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Analysts, however, now see more open-source groups than ever before, realizing that there might be gold to be found in their code.

"Were seeing a grand experiment under way now. Many open-source project teams are trying different approaches to monetizing their projects," observed Dan Kusnetzky, IDCs VP for system software research.

This development isnt just about turning a corporate profit, though. Some open-source projects need to turn commercial to keep going.

"Its a bit of a mix," said Gordon Haff, senior analyst for research house Illuminata Inc., "but certainly many of the major projects are very dependent on developers who are paid to work full-time on them, which in turn implies that some commercial entity is either profiting or hoping to profit."

"The fact is Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Oracle, HP, Apache, JBoss, Debian, Mandriva, Turbo Linux et al. have to make money somehow. Common sense dictates that without a visible revenue stream or revenue generating business plan, these businesses will not be able to keep their doors open or the lights on, or secure financing (in some cases)."

So it is that DiDio believes that "the Linux distribution vendors and OEM hardware vendors are clearly commercializing Linux offerings and adopting licensing models that—although they are not nearly as expensive as commercial offerings— are trying to impose more structure and specific conditions on the models. [The same is true] for the larger and more popular open-source applications."